An inkjet printing system, as one embodiment of a fluid ejection system, may include a printhead assembly, an ink supply assembly which supplies liquid ink to the printhead assembly, and a controller which controls the printhead assembly. The printhead assembly, as one embodiment of a fluid ejection device, ejects ink drops through a plurality of orifices or nozzles and toward a print medium, such as a sheet of paper, so as to print onto the print medium. Typically, the orifices are arranged in one or more arrays such that properly sequenced ejection of ink from the orifices causes characters or other images to be printed upon the print medium as the printhead assembly and the print medium are moved relative to each other.
Typically, the printhead assembly ejects the ink drops through the nozzles by rapidly heating a small volume of ink located in vaporization chambers with small electric heaters, such as thin film resistors, often referred to as firing resistors. Heating the ink causes the ink to vaporize and be ejected from the nozzles. Typically, for one dot of ink, a remote printhead controller, typically located as part of the processing electronics of a printer, controls activation of an electrical current from a power supply external to the printhead assembly. The electrical current is passed through a selected firing resistor to heat the ink in a corresponding selected vaporization chamber.
Typically, firing resistors are connected to the power supply via shared current carrying paths. One characteristic of such a configuration is that as different numbers of firing resistors are energized to print various forms of data, different currents flow resulting in different voltage drops across parasitic resistances of the current carrying paths. Consequently, even though the power supply voltage may be held constant, voltage provided to a given firing resistor and the resulting energy produced may vary. Furthermore, if the power supply voltage is maintained at a level high enough to accommodate the worst case parasitic voltage drop occurring when a maximum number of firing resistors are energized, a firing resistor may be over-energized in a case where only one firing resistor is energized. As a result, energy control is a beneficial feature in inkjet printheads to insure that neither too little, nor too much energy is delivered to a firing resistor. Too little energy may cause print quality degradation, while too much energy may shorten firing resistor life.
One approach employed to correct this problem is to provide voltage regulators on a printhead assembly integrated circuit chip for groups of firing resistors. However, the voltage regulators dissipate unwanted power and generally require factory calibration to be effective. Other approaches compensate for firing resistor power variations by using on-chip voltage sensing and varying a firing pulse width for a group of firing resistors conducting at a same instant to thereby hold energy substantially constant. However, while the energy is constant, power is unregulated and can cause firing resistor failure if it becomes excessive.
Printing systems, particularly wide-array inkjet printing systems having long current-carrying paths and correspondingly high parasitic resistance values, would benefit from an improved energy control scheme.